The people who advance most quickly in new roles aren’t necessarily the most ambitious, qualified, or hard-working—they’re the ones who arrive with a clear idea of what they’re looking to learn, contribute, and accomplish.
Rapid advancement might not be your goal, but incredible things can happen when you hold yourself to a compressed timeline. And even if your goals shift over time (they will), the point of creating them is the effort it takes to define them in the first place.
A trap I see many brilliant folks falling into is treating their job as a cog in the organization’s machinery, rather than a vehicle by which to accelerate their professional trajectory. When we contort ourselves to fit into a machine, it often starches out the thing that makes us special and differentiated.
The reality is that the best opportunities benefit from (and encourage) the things not listed in the job description, and these unique contributions can paradoxically stem from what you’re bringing rather than what you’re asked to do.
This doesn’t mean that we can ignore our responsibilities—executing on those is table stakes—but we can also earn the privilege of contributing more.
And one of the many benefits of knowing what you’re looking to get out of an experience is the clarity that informs when it’s time to make a change.
